Flight of the Vajra (5 page)

I stood at the far end of the patio, a wrought-iron
fence blocking my way, and a dish of raspberry-flavored shaved ice on the table
next to me. End’s ice was passion-lemon; she leaned back against the fence and
eyed the larger of the two moons as it edged into view.

I’ve learned to depend on my real senses, not the
web of synthetic ones that we’ve created for ourselves on more upscale worlds. Your
native senses don’t always give you more precise information, or give it to you
faster, but they’re a lot more interesting. That was why I perked up when I saw
a man and a woman enter the patio area and walk straight for us—no, not us,
exactly, but Enid. She almost dropped her spoon.

“Enid?” The woman said that one word like she was
trying not to break a spell. She was tall, all knees and elbows, frizzy brown hair
pointing all ways like a compass rose. I remembered her: she had been one of
the two fencers who had dueled on the high wire after Enid had left it behind. The
equally tall, equally limber, hollow-faced man next to her had been her
partner, and he held up a flat sheet of MemoCel that had a translucent still image
of Enid’s face on it.

“We’ve been tearing this whole city apart,” the
man continued. “What in cosm’s name have you been doing? We’re leaving in two
hours. You know how hard it is to find someone on a planet where CLs aren’t
allowed? And was
this
supposed to be a
joke
?” He tugged the sheet
at either end and Enid’s image began speaking:
I don’t know any other way to
say this, so I’ll just say goodbye. It’s been fun being with you—

“It’s not a joke.” End put her ice down and stood
away from the fence. “I’m staying right here.”

—
and the last two years, I wouldn’t trade them
for anything else. But I can’t keep running around like this anymore. Please
don’t look for me.

“I guess you guys ignored that part,” the real
Enid said, twisting up one side of her mouth. “Sev sent the two of you out to
look for me, didn’t he?”

“Sev’s busy enough without having to look for you.”
The man wadded up the MemoCel in one fist. “Who is this man? —Are you
responsible for this, sir?”

“I couldn’t tell you if I was or not,” I said. I
looked at Enid; she seemed calm enough, but it was the clamped-down kind of
calm that seemed ready to fly apart at any second. “I only just bumped into
her. —Look, Enid, they’re obviously worried about you. If you’re not gonna go
back with them, at least say a proper goodbye? It seems like you owe them at
least that much.”

One of the few people seated out in the patio
area, a woman in a close-fitting blue robe, had turned her dismayed attention
our way. I blinked back at her and managed a weak smile:
I just got here
myself, okay?

Enid looked at her feet, then back at the woman.
One step, two, and then Enid’s wrists were draped atop the other woman’s
shoulders. She bowed her head.

“I
can’t
stay with you,” Enid said, and
while her voice was tiny enough by then it was made even tinier with her head
down. “Every time we stop somewhere I keep asking myself the same thing:
What
if I just stayed here for a while?
What kind of road would I be on if I did
that? But I’m never on any of those roads; I’m only on
your
road.”

The woman reached down and put her hand to the
back of Enid’s neck, stroking slowly. “Agoro, you knew she was going to say
something like this.”

The man (Agoro, I presumed) pinched his eyes
closed, then opened them again. “Would you at least come back with us and tell
Sev to his face that you’re leaving?”

“You were with them for what, two years?” I said,
prompting Enid to raise her head and look back at me. “What’s another few
minutes to say goodbye?”

Pause. I made a
go on, humor them
gesture.

“You think I’m
stupid
, don’t you.” Enid let
her hands fall from the woman’s shoulders. She was looking at me, but it wasn’t
hard to believe she was speaking to all of us just then.

“I don’t think you’re stupid, no.” I used the most
factual voice I could find just then, which turned out to be pretty
factual-sounding. “I just think that . . . ”

She
was
listening, I thought. I went on.

“I just think maybe you’ve never done this before.
Saying goodbye on your own, that is. The first time
you’re
the one
turning and walking away, instead of someone else . . . ”

Yeah, that’s always tough, I thought. No wonder
you had no idea how to go about doing it. Maybe you’re like me: you’re worried
that if you try and do it properly, you’ll change your mind.

“Go say goodbye the right way,” I said, and gave
her head a pat of my own. “Even if it hurts.”

Enid blotted furiously at her fresh tears, and her
face turned red enough to look like I’d smeared it with my dessert. But she let
each of them take one of her hands and walk with her back out through the hotel
lobby.

Some part of me was sure that was the last time I
would ever see her. She’d go back to the bay where the Sky Theater’s ship was
parked, and then there would be more tears and regret and soon she’d be shaking
her head at ever having wanted to leave behind so many good people. That seemed
about right.

I finished my dessert, then admired the moon as the
line of the elevator bisected it vertically for a moment. A winking silver dot
on that line, an inbound ship, also traversed the moon’s face top to bottom.
Hope you know what you’re getting yourself into down here, I thought.

Upstairs in my room,
the message slot
over the desk was showing I had mail.
Physical
mail. That was either
very good news or very, very bad.

I let the desk read all the biometrics it needed from
me, then tore open the little envelope that protruded from the slot, ignoring
the codings and stamps on the outside. The note inside was hand-printed on
paper that felt finer than the sheets in most luxury hotels. Someone had gone
through a lot of deeply impractical trouble to get my attention.

Mr. Henré Sim:

Please do me the honor of allowing me to
receive you for a private audience from 1400 to 1500 hours local time tomorrow
at the Leonelia Room in the Cytherian Summit Lodge.

Her Grace, The 16th Supreme Kathaya of the Old
Way, Angharad il-Jakaya.

RSVP

I called the front desk and told them I wanted to
report a tasteless prank. They told me, in the solemn tones reserved for
telling children two and two does not in fact make three, that the note had
been verified as genuine by Cytherian Summit Authorities. All the junk on the
envelope, the stuff I’d torn in half without looking at it, that was their certification,
which they would be happy to reconfirm for me in my presence . . .

I RSVPed and said yes, I’d be there at the
appointed time. I had no reason to be insulting, even if I wasn’t one of the
Old Way myself anymore. Curiosity hadn’t killed me yet.

I set the Do Not Disturb lock for the room, moved
the furniture, did my exercises, then opened the tallest bottle in the in-room
bar and made myself snug with it.

They called it the Old Way
for a
variety of reasons.
Old
meaning
original
;
old
meaning
venerable
;
old
in all the positive ways something could be called old.

There were trillions of people across hundreds of
worlds who followed the Old Way. Through all the generations that had come
since humanity had migrated away from its home star, those of the Old Way had
handed down their perspective about humanity’s place in the cosmos. They had
seen their brothers and sisters reach out into the universe and change themselves
drastically in the process—not that we hadn’t already been changing by the time
we left Earth, but that the changes possible in the universe at large were far
more radical than anything that could have happened at home.

In short hops at first, and then in leaps and
bounds, humanity not only left old Sol far behind but left behind more of the
things that could be called human. His useful lifespan could now be expanded
from decades into centuries and with decrepitude staved off almost
indefinitely. His mortality could be defrayed or short-circuited entirely via a
number of technological cheats: making a periodic external backup image of the
brain’s own wiring and restoring it in the event of failure; or moving the mind
entirely into a perpetually-sustainable container that wouldn’t betray its
owner by dropping dead.

The worlds where such things became commonplace,
the Highend worlds, soon all had a few things in common. They prided themselves
on their prowess; they held themselves up as the
true
humanity that for
so long had been constrained by rotting little bodies or the prison of Earth.
They looked at their less-evolved brethren with a condescending little smile
and agreed that, yes, there was a place for both “lower” and “higher” men in
the universe ... provided everyone understood their place. They had no problems
with shirking that many more “human” things. Childhood, for instance: why
bother with a childhood when you could simply instantiate any number of adults
as needed, and save everyone a great deal of messy trouble and heartache? (The
same measure did away with the annoyances of child-
rearing
as well.)

But there were still plenty who hadn’t chosen to
let these things happen.

Going out into space, living there, dying there,
being born there—all of that had only cemented for them all the more firmly
what man’s limits were. Man wasn’t constrained by death or the limits of his
body, unless he convinced himself such things were constraints in the first
place. Those things were not what constrained us, but what inspired us. To try
and throw away all that would only remove from our lives that many more lessons
the universe had to teach us, individually and collectively. A man with dirt on
his hands was more of a man than just a biological container with some
intelligence bubbling in it. Birth, life and death were not prison sentences or
afflictions to be cured. They were our way of acting as the very substance of
the universe.

Even on my worst days, I still liked the way all
that sounded.

Such a collection of ideas found its greatest
power not in the constitutional documents of a state, nor in the musings of an
abstract philosophy. It concentrated itself and ignited into its fullest flame
only when it was a work of faith, one which took the name “Old Way” to set
itself that much apart from all that was compulsively new.

Those of the Old Way saw, much as they had feared
would happen, the Highend worlds turning further inwards with each century.
Their great intellects, their technical prowess, were no longer about discovery
but about preservation—and soon not even about preservation but mere
maintenance. Why allow more people to come into being when you can simply keep the
ones that already exist? Never mind that new people means new ideas, new
perspectives, new muscle to build what had to be built and maintain what would
always fall apart of its own accord. They could get any number of such people
from the Old Way worlds, after all.

And by the time they came to that conclusion, they’d
been proven right.

The Old Way worlds had no shortage of a sense of
the humane over the merely human. But the centuries had allowed what was once
brave and fierce to become fearful and reactionary, to let warm belief grow
cold and congeal into mere dogma and catechism. Billions were ready to emigrate
each year for the slightest chance to live on a Highend world, out of the sense
that even living in the shadow of the Highend would be a better deal than to
live on a world where all those things that seemed increasingly attractive were
denied on principle—longevity, death-cheating, technologies without
restrictions of either law or etiquette hemming them in. They had spent
generations telling themselves they didn’t need any of that, and now they were
mulling over the grim possibility that they had been just plain fools.

What no one denied was the charisma and grace of
the Old Way’s spiritual leadership. Each Kathaya of the Old Way, from Kundun of
Kshatriya to Ellund al-Halvand, had used the force of their personality to
light that many more fires in the hearts of those following the Old Way. In
many places—the more the Kathaya was around, the better—it was easy to believe
the Old Way had lost none of its magnetism or power to inspire.

Then came the 16th Kathaya, Angharad, and for the
first time in generations we had a Kathaya of the Old Way that didn’t simply
warm a cushion back on the Old Way homeworld of Kathayagara, or let the Old
Way’s Council of the Achitraka do all the grunt-work. She got up off her duff
and
did
things. She sat in on immigration quota talks between Old Way
world Merridon and Highend university planet Omn Leva. When violence broke out
on Nestor’s Planet between Old Way factions (pro- vs. anti-CL), she went there
in person and sat all of them down in the same room to broker both a cease-fire
and a workable compromise about the use of CL. She didn’t have a CL herself,
but she couldn’t deny its usefulness. What the Old Way was against—and what she
rejected, too—was a society where the CL
was
the sum total of human
contact. The reigning joke was that Angharad spent so little time on
Kathayagara, they hadn’t even bothered to put her name on the door.

I found it fitting, then, that the numbers of those
who counted themselves followers of the Old Way were on an accelerating upswing
over the year and change I tried to pick up the pieces of the Kyritan and
failed. Before I went off on my own, I took the ikons of Angharad I had in my
house, walked three kilometers, and threw them into the Ulanjara River. There
was, thankfully, no law on the books against sacrilege on my homeworld, so they
just fined me for littering.

I was brutally sober the morning I was to meet
Angharad,
but it wasn’t like I had made all that valiant an
attempt to empty all those bottles. That bottle I’d opened had been something
that passed for a local whiskey, and I’d barely drained a single glass of that
varnish before calling it quits. Besides, I’d noticed that most of my attempts
to get rolling drunk revolved mostly around whether or not there was an
audience, as a way for people to further depress their expectations of me and
let their guard down.

Angharad’s full-blown town meeting was scheduled
for the day after my private soirée with her. 1400 local time was something
like 1100 standard solar. A thirty-hour day wasn’t too bad; I’d been in places
with a thirty-five hour day, which was about at the outer limit of what I could
handle personally. Not because of biology, although that did figure in, but one’s
own expectations and attention span. It hadn’t always been like that: in the
years while I was in hiding, shortly before I came back out as a cultivated
degenerate, I’d build up the discipline to last through fifty-hour days and up
if it came to it. I just hadn’t needed to yet. It would come in handy someday,
though . . . or so I told myself.

I came out of the hotel elevator and almost walked
right into Enid. She had been curled up in a chair not far from the elevator
doors, and she bounded to her feet like a dog being offered to go for a walk.

“What’re you doing here?” I didn’t care if I
sounded petulant; not that it deflated any of her enthusiasm.

“I came back after I said my goodbyes. You weren’t
taking any calls, so I waited . . . and I figured you’d come
downstairs for breakfast or something.”

“I am. I’m eating alone.”

“You had lunch with me yesterday. You liked it.
Why can’t we have breakfast together?”

I stopped at the doorway to the buffet lounge and
faced her full-on. “Did you
really
say goodbye to the rest of the circus
crew last night? Or did you just ditch out on them and sleep on a rooftop
somewhere?”

She unrolled a sheet of MemoCel from her pocket—the
same one she’d left for her stablemate, I guessed—and snapped it flat right in
front of my nose. Her voice (from behind the MemoCel’s POV, I suppose) recited
one choked goodbye after another as various faces—some painted, some masked,
some bare—drifted back and forth, in and out of focus. I recognized Agoro and
the frizz-haired woman from the other day, standing to one side and dipping in
and out of the displayed field of vision as everything else moved around.

Once she saw I was as satisfied as I could have
been, Enid rolled the sheet shut and stuck it in a tubular pocket that ran the
length of her left thigh.

“We can have breakfast,” I said, and immediately
felt myself sink that much more as she perked up, “but after that I’ve got
business to deal with. Alone.”

“Business? I thought you were here to goof off.”

“I got roped into some business. Evidently I wasn’t
goofing off efficiently enough.”

The buffet was a rip-off. Scrambled runny eggs,
overcooked sausage—I eventually gave up on everything except for my oatmeal,
which reminded me of quick-setting duracrete. So much for the merits of Old Way
style hand-cooking, at least here. Enid plowed through not one but
two
platefuls of the worst they had to offer; she ate like she’d lose a bet if she
didn’t finish everything.

“Where’re you from originally?” I asked despite
myself.

“Cordelia. Do you know it?”

“I know that it’s Old Way, but not much more than
that.”

“It barely counts as Old Way anymore. Things were
starting to fall apart around the time I was born. They allowed CLs, but I
never liked having one even when I was a kid, so my parents and I moved around
a bit until we found ourselves in a neighborhood that was still pretty Old Way.
I got into dance and gymnastics really young.”

“You said you were emancipated.”

“Long story.”

Oh, I thought. Mention that and she clams right
up. That narrowed it down: her parents had either died or ditched her, and she’d
emancipated herself after being under the troupe’s patronage for a bit—long
enough for her to prove she could manage on her own if she had to. I choked off
that train of thought before it led me to say something that would touch too
many of her nerves at once.

Enid reached into a pocket on her right thigh and
brought out five of the gold coins that were among the largest minted
denominations on Cytheria. I looked at them stacked on the table between us, picked
one up, and let it just sit there in my hand. It was heavy enough to leave
dents in the veneer if I put it back down.

“Where’d you get all this?” I said. “Severance
pay?”

She nodded “Back wages they owed me. They wanted
to make sure I had it before I left.”

“You could live pretty decently for
. . . a year or so here, with that much. Cytheria’s cheap, at least
for now.” I put the coin back on the pile with the heavy clack of platinum
hitting platinum. “Why not just stick around here for a bit? Chase the
neighborhood kids around some more, get into some ball games. Do some of your
stunts for the evening tourist crowds. That kind of thing.”

“I’ve been doing stuff like that anyway, Henré.”
She took the pile of coins and started trading them slowly from hand to hand. “I
want something else now. I want something that isn’t just . . . me
pulling these little routines for audiences. The whole time I was with the Sky
Theater, I kept thinking: I don’t just want to be one of all these other
people. I want . . . me and someone else.”

The way she was stumbling around with her words, I
needed to say something that blunt to put her back on track. She doesn’t know
what she wants, I told myself; she just knows that she want something. That’s
what it is to be a kid, still.

“I think I’m a little old for you,” I pointed out.

To my surprise, she didn’t get riled—not much,
anyway. She let out a laugh, like what I’d said was a challenge she was more
than ready to meet. “I wasn’t thinking about it
that
way!”

“Fine! So what way
were
you thinking about
it?”

“Well, I thought—me, and someone else I could call
a . . . a creative collaborator, I guess. Or I could be someone’s
bodyguard, even. I’m a brown belt, remember?” She was looking right at me.

“A bodyguard?” I slapped my fingers to my chest. “You
don’t think I know how to defend myself?”

She just smiled and pointed her bright little eyes
at me with that fierce look that came so easily to her. Man, I thought, if only
you really knew what I could do with all the technology I’ve designed and
concealed on my person and elsewhere. Too bad I can’t show it off casually without
getting arrested a dozen times over. For emergency use only, indeed.

I stood up and started fishing for my wallet. It
wasn’t like I couldn’t use my credit on Cytheria, but the majority of Old Way
worlds (and their black markets, and their illegal labor) used and respected
cash in some form, and whenever possible I preferred to pay cash and tip with
it, too. The art of crossing palms with physical silver (or greasing them) had
never quite died out, thanks to its immediate and gratifying psychological
impact . . . or its political expediency.